Robert Rauschenberg, »Solstice«, 1968

The New York Times
May 14, 2008
Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82.

He died of heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the artist’s gallery in Manhattan.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of postwar modernism.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.”

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An introduction to Lars Vilhelmsen’s project The Sandwich Box

The Sandwich Box, having grown out of his earlier artworks, inscribes a new element onto Lars Vilhelmsen’s art practice. The following text explains its evolutionary process, beginning with Lars’ work, How Scandinavian Of Me, The Travellers Secret Box and Scandinavian-t-ransit, and arriving now to The Sandwich Box. There is also an explanation of how The Sandwich Box project will operate, what intentions and concerns will be searched out and examined, and how these will be incorporated into the project.

The Sandwich Box will be ongoing and continuous, and will involve a number of artists on a collaborative level. The resulting collaborative artworks and ongoing project documentation, will be evaluated and published on the www.thesandwichboxsite.org at each stage of the project.

© Toni Hafkenscheid, Grand Canyon, 2008
colour photograph mounted to cintra and plexiglass
Courtesy Birch Libralato Gallery

CONTACT is an annual month long festival of photography that takes place at over 200 venues across the Greater Toronto Area from May 1 - 31. As the largest photography festival in the world, CONTACT has become a premiere cultural event in Toronto with a broad range of international programming. This includes exhibitions, public installations, films, lectures, seminars and workshops. CONTACT participants, whether acclaimed international artists or local emerging photographers, exhibit in a variety of venues, from major public museums to private galleries and many alternative spaces including subway stations, billboards, the airport and city streets.

CONTACT 2008 examines how photography shapes our understanding of the world around us and the enduring role it plays in the preservation of individual and collective memories. A wide range of images – from the epic to the everyday – look beyond the headlines to explore private and social histories.

Between Memory and History: Throughout the years, CONTACT has questioned photography’s ability to represent the truth, explored rapidly increasing global interconnections and celebrated constructed imagery within a photographic culture. Despite its ever evolving conditions, a fundamental characteristic of the medium – its ability to preserve our individual memories and collective histories – at least for the moment, remains unchanged.

Photography has been associated with memory since its invention and memory has long been described as a continuous exchange of images. As we experience the global shift from film to digital technology, will photographic images merely become “memories made easy”? As the increasing participation in CONTACT demonstrates, photography is prevalent throughout our lives, now more then ever before, and wields a complex relationship to human experience.

Featured Exhibitions:

APR 26 - MAY 31
CONFABULATION / SHANGHAI DRAGON
TONI HAFKENSCHEID, LOUISE NOGUCHI
Birch Libralato >>

APR 28 - JUN 6
DREAM CITY OF AMERICA
DAVE FISHER
Scotiabank - Main Banking Hall - Scotia Plaza >>

APR 30 - JUN 8
DRAWN FROM MEMORY
EVAN LEE
Monte Clark Gallery >>

APR 30 - MAY 24
PARKING ON PERSONAL WEBCAMS
CHERYL SOURKES
Peak Gallery >>

APR 30 - MAY 31
SOMMES-NOUS? TENDANCE FLOUE
PASCAL AIMAR, THIERRY ARDOUIN, DENIS BOURGES, GILLES COULON, OLIVIER CULMANN, MAT JACOB, CATY JAN, PHILIPPE LOPPARELLI, BERTRAND MEUNIER, MEYER, FLORE-AëL SURUN, PATRICK TOURNEBOEUF
ALLIANCE FRANCAISE >>

MAY 1 - 31
AUFHEBUNG
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE
Olga Korper Gallery >>

exhibitions listing continues on CONTACT website

** if you travel into Canada, make sure that you have the proper ID.

Photo Credit: Jackson-Triggs Estate Winery, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario (detail)
KPMB Architects, completion, 2001
Photo credit: Eduard Heuber/Arch Photo Inc.

Museum London presents: Architecture, Sustainability and Local Identity: film and discussion about the future of architecture, suburbia and urban development.

Friday, May 9 at 7:30 pm
FILM SCREENING

Lecture Theatre

Radiant City: A Documentary about Urban Sprawl
Followed by a Q & A with directors Gary Burns and Jim Brown

Venturing into territory both familiar and foreign, directors Gary Burns and Jim Brown turn the documentary genre inside out, crafting a vivid account of life in The Late Suburban Age.

Burns and Brown rummage through a toybox of cultural references, from Jane Jacobs to The Sopranos, to create a provocative reflection on why we live the way we do. Riffing off sitcoms and reality TV, they play fast and loose with a range of cinematic devices to consider what happens when cities get sick and mutate.

Radiant City was recently awarded the Genie for Best Documentary.

Saturday, May 10 at 1 pm
LECTURE

Lecture Theatre

James Howard Kunstler has long been recognized as a fierce critic of suburban sprawl and the high costs associated with an automobile-centric culture. He is the author of The Geography of Nowhere (Simon & Schuster, 1993) and Home from Nowhere (Simon & Schuster, 1996). Most recently, he authored The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.

“The future will require us to build better places, or the future will belong to other people in other societies.”
– James Howard Kunstler

Saturday, May 10 at 3:00 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION

Lecture Theatre

Local Identity and Regional Responses to Sustainable Architecture

Balancing environmental, social, and sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life and is already reshaping the fields of architecture and product design. This panel discussion will explore such topics as the role architecture plays in defining humanity’s relationship to its physical and cultural context, nationally and with a local focus on the City of London. Among the issues discussed will be contemporary and future urban design, sustainability, the development of green buildings and the protection of heritage streetscapes.

Moderator:
John Nicholson, principle architect with the award winning firm Malhotra, Nicholson and Sheffield Architects Inc.

Panelists:
Brian Dust is an associate architect with the award winning Vancouver firm Neale Staniszkis Doll and Adams Architects.

John McMinn is an associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture. In 1992 he was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Prix de Rome in Architecture. His professional interests include architectural and environmental design, poetic tectonics, contemporary urbanism and vernacular landscapes.

Marco Polo is an assistant professor at Ryerson University and is the editor of The Prix de Rome in Architecture: A Retrospective, published by Coach House Books (2006). Polo’s areas of specialization include Canadian architecture since 1945, regionalism in Canadian Architecture and the cultural dimensions of sustainability.

Together Polo and McMinn curated the exhibition 41 to 66: Regional Responses to Sustainable Architecture, organized by Cambridge Galleries. A version of this exhibition will represent Canada at the prestigious Venice Biennale in Architecture from September 14 to November 23, 2008.

Saturday, May 10, 5:30 to 7:30 pm
COMMUNITY FORUM

Lorraine Ivey Shuttleworth Community Gallery

Community members are invited to discuss the changing landscape of London in a conversation led by City of London urban designer Sean Galloway.

NOTE: All sessions of ARCHITECTURE, SUSTAINABILITY AND LOCAL IDENTITY are offered free of charge, although space is limited. To reserve your ticket please RSVP by calling 519.661.0333. Tickets will be available at the door the day of the program.

Museum London is located at 421 Ridout Street North, London, Ontario. For general information please contact us at 519.661.0333.

Museum London

** if you travel into Canada, make sure that you have the proper ID.

Whitwell Middle School in rural Tennessee is the setting for this documentary about an extraordinary experiment in Holocaust education. Struggling to grasp the concept of 6 million Holocaust victims, the students decide to collect 6 million paper clips to better understand the enormity of the calamity. The film details how the students met Holocaust survivors from around the world and how the experience transformed them and their community.

Hysteria and the Body opens April 18 @ Art Gallery of Windsor

Major international art exhibition looks at stereotypes about women, their bodies and “the female malady”

Organized by the National Gallery of Canada
Art Gallery of Windsor – 401 Riverside Drive West, Windsor, Ontario, N9A 7J1
March 29, – June 15, 2008
Opening Reception at 7 pm on April 18

Featuring some of the most important women artists working today in Europe, Canada and the US, this stunning exhibition looks at the long and troubling association of women and hysteria, which is often based on deeply-rooted stereotypes and assumptions.

In the 19th century, psychiatry deemed hysteria, a functional disturbance of the nervous system, a “female malady”, but since the 1970s, many women artists – and a few men – have mimicked hysteria as a means of empowerment to resist traditional gender roles. The exhibition Hysteria and the Body investigates many related ideas, including the “hysterical” body, stereotypes of femininity, aging, motherhood, and individual identity.

Featuring work by internationally acclaimed artists like Cindy Sherman (American), Louise Bourgeois (French), Annette Messager (French), Jana Sterbak (Canadian), Marina Abramovic (born in Serbia), Pipilotti Rist (Swiss) and Vito Acconci (American), Hysteria includes sculptures, video, prints, drawing and photography. The exhibition seeks to disrupt traditional ways of viewing the figure and our preconceptions of “normal” behaviour.

www.artgalleryofwindsor.com

** if you travel into Canada, make sure that you have the proper ID.

Nicole Miller, MFA Painting Thesis Exhibition

DeVries Student Gallery
Richmond Center for Visual Arts
Opening Reception Monday April 21, 5-9pm

www.nicolevanessamiller.com

There will be installations from the Alternative Process class in the critique spaces in Kohrman and other areas of the studio building. Also in rm 2206 in Kohrman there will be an installation by Jesse Soltis from the Time Based Media class.

All from 5-8pm on Friday 4/18.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Wednesday. He was 90.

He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he came up with the scientific concept that small effects lead to big changes, something that was explained in a simple example known as the “butterfly effect.” He explained how something as minuscule as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil changes the constantly moving atmosphere in ways that could later trigger tornadoes in Texas.

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LGA Landing Pattern in Brooklyn

LGA Final Approaches over Queens

Photography is by nature an exploration of time. The blink of an eye may be frozen by the shutter. Or in the case of this series, many minutes or even hours add up to construct a single image punctuated by the paths of commercial airplanes traversing the night skies. These white streaks, the only aspect of the planes visible in the photographs, are created by the landing and navigation lighting on every plane. Each line represents the amount of time it takes a commercial flight to pass through the frame. The work pays respect to pioneering photographers Edward Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, and their studies of motion, while representing the passage of time in an unfamiliar, challenging, and visually rewarding manner.

In photographing from residential and often marginal areas immediately surrounding large commercial airports, a sense of grace, solitude, and quiet peacefulness is created from the otherwise hectic airport environments. Gone are the long lines, the anxieties, and even the massive planes themselves. The audience is challenged to consider this work as metaphor for our desire for escape and the increasingly interconnected world in which we live. Ultimately, they are asked to reflect on the impact of all of this on the environment.

CRITICAL MASS TOP 50, 2007 - Kevin Cooley

www.kevincooley.net

Richmond Center plasma screens - Replay on 4/15

Congo - Belgium: 1′05″, stereo
Myriam Thyes, DE/CH, 2005

** includes Deanna Morse + animation class from Grand Rapids

Myriam Thyes - Düsseldorf Germany
www.flag-metamorphoses.net

see original post on 17 Days Blog

ART 3560 Web students respond ….. 4/16

Natalieann Rich
Sri Lanka - Thailand

Student flash projects include:

Natalieann Rich: Sri Lanka - Thailand
Stacey Averill: Kiribati - Nauru
Lee Schwingler: Guatemala - Honduras
Michael Sisk: St. Kitts and Nevis - St. Lucia
Whitney Goodell: Panama - Peru
Sonya Mansour: Bahamas - Eritrea

Documentarian Jennifer Baichwal tells the true stories behind the faces of the Kentucky Appalachian inhabitants — once labeled hillbillies — who were originally captured through the camera lens of photographer Shelby Lee Adams 30 years earlier. Baichwal tracks the lives of two families who have each endured their share of heartache throughout their struggle to resist the influence of American popular culture.

Water & Wind: Window, 2007 - 3:49 mins

more information and complete schedule:
17days.wordpress.com

leave any comments on 17 Days Blog, not here, please and thank you

Jacqueline Wilson, BFA Ceramics Thesis Exhibition
Reception April 18, 5-8pm

This project began with my daughter. My seven-year-old daughter loves pink. She wants to wear only pink clothes and only own pink toys and objects. My daughter is not unusual. Most other little girls in the United States and South Korea love pink clothing, accessories and toys. This phenomenon seems widespread among various ethnic groups of children regardless of their cultural backgrounds. This preference is the result of cultural influences and the power of pervasive commercial advertisements such as those for Barbie and Hello Kitty. Through advertising, customers are directed to buy blue items for boys and pink for girls. Blue has become a symbol of strength and masculinity, while pink symbolizes sweetness and femininity.

To make The Pink and Blue Project series, I visited children’s rooms, where I displayed their possessions in an effort to show the viewer the extent to which children and their parents, knowingly or unknowing, are influenced by advertising and popular culture.

CRITICAL MASS TOP 50, 2007 - Jeongmee Yoon

In case you missed the campus lecture - Batik Lecture @ the KIA
April 15, 2008 - 12:15 pm

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts
314 S. Park St
Kalamazoo MI 49007

Opera Jawa!
Kalamazoo Premiere
April 15, 2008 - 5:30pm - 2008 Richmond Center

Artist Entang Wiharso will discuss his work on this film after the screening.

Turn 13745 April 2004 / Turn 15384 April 2004

32″ X 44″ lightjet prints / Installation mock-up for an exhibition proposal in Germany

Turn 21139 April 2006 / Turn 20214 April 2006

(More Turns) The Subway Turnstile Pictures I developed a situation so that various subjects could be defined by the constraints of exactly the same mechanical apparatus. The scenario consisted of someone passing through a subway turnstile. At the moment that the subjects passed through the turnstile, unknown to them, I took their picture stationed at a distance of eleven feet. I stood there turning pages of a magazine observing subjects out of the corner of my eye, waiting for only the moment when they pushed the turnstile bar to release the shutter.

I was tired of the conventions in which most photographs of people are taken. And I was tired of the results that often seem to pass for poetry. I needed something to be objective: I wanted the context to be clearly established. I wanted to play a role in the situation, but I wanted the situation to take a photograph of itself for me. I would design the scenarios in which this could happen, and then the situation could be responsible for creating the picture. The poetry would be as much in the design of that scenario as from any photograph that might come from it. These situations would include me but I would disappear as any kind of typical photographer. I would simply play a role in the scenario.

The series More Turns is part of a trilogy of work entitled 3Situations. The other 2 series involve people sitting for another artist’s portrait and being in an elevator as the doors open and close. Together the 3 series reveal how icons are created through framing, and how the grammar of portraiture is found in the world around us.

CRITICAL MASS TOP 50, 2007 - Bill Sullivan

www.3situations.com

Director Philippe Diaz exposes some of the issues the movie Blood Diamond touched upon in this award-winning documentary on the atrocities that occurred in Sierra Leone, West Africa. In 1991, a civil war exploded in this tiny, diamond-rich country, fueled by a rebel group against exploitative Western interests. But instead of coming to the aid of the people, the international community manipulated an election and used violent means for their own ends.